Monthly Archives: April 2016

In October, 2014, I visited Jerusalem with my husband Jonathan.While he spent his days participating in the annual conference of the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, I visited sites in Israel and Palestine. I went first to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum. It was appropriate to do so; it is like making confession before praying. To say it was a moving experience is to engage in gross understatement. Two elements were particularly moving to me (and I was touched everywhere I turned). First was the memorial to the children lost in the Holocaust. I could not stop weeping. Second, I went to the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto. At first, I had a hard time seeing it. I was standing in the middle of very large space that looked like a town square. But there was nothing there. Then I realized that was the memorial . . . there was no one left. The people were wiped out. Only the town square remains. More tears.

A few days later, I traveled to Kfar Shaul, a mental hospital a little ways further out from Jerusalem than Yad Vashem. A participant in Jonathan’s conference told me he had walked from Yad Vashem to Kfar Shaul in well less than an hour.

Why did I go to the site of a mental hospital? I went, as I went to Yad Vashem, to honor the dead and missing, this time those killed on April 9, 1948 and those who fled the killing from what was then a small Palestinian village, Deir Yassin. The attack on the village by Zionist paramilitary groups, the Irgun and Lehi, was part of the fierce fighting that was going on between local Arabs and Jews for control of land that was to become the State of Israel.

Reports of the killing of villagers in Deir Yassin spread quickly among many villages and the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians began.

The entry gate to Kfar Shaul, with the buildings of Deir Yassin behind. Author’s picture

Today, instead of a marker for the lost village, or any other sign of what happened here 68 years ago today, now the village buildings comprise an Israeli mental hospital called Kfar Shaul. Of course, that facility is behind locked gates, and there is no public entry. There is here an echo of the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto–nobody remains.

I have written the poem below–and I continue to work on it, because it feels incomplete yet–to commemorate my visit in 2014, and to keep erasure of Deir Yassin before us. I will not forget. I ask that you not forget either.

Deir Yassin, Where Are You?

The distance between Yad Vashem and Kfar Shaul more than a stone can throw less than a good morning walk but the canyon between each gapes wide and deep like yes and no a wound buried in enough denial to be ignored

Deir Yassin, where are you?

I. Yad Vashem records the horrors of Holocaust the truth of inhumanity shining the deepness of honesty on brutality recounting the names and faces of victims recalling the perpetrators of butchery recording the names of the righteous among the nations who refused to lie in bed with evil

Tears flow hearts ache minds recoil as we repeat Never Again Never Again knowing in the lurking memory of time it is a promise we may not keep

Yad Vashem.

Deir Yassin, where are you?

II. Kfar Shaul tells a different story speaking in code known to those who want to forget a moment of silence lasting lifetimes a center for mental health mental health resting on the remains of a village living in denial recording nothing of the souls buried beneath its glassy façade locking patients and remembrances of things past lives gone behind security cameras and guard posts

Kfar Shaul.

Deir Yassin, where are you?

III. It was a day in what should have been another lifetime but feels like only yesterday the wounds buried just deep enough in denial to be ignored continuing the mournful fugue of historical futility A day April 9 1948 righteous men believing in a vision to reclaim their ancient home struck out at villagers in homes these in the wrong place at the wrong time on the wrong side at least the losing side

Deir Yassin, where are you?

100 or 250 gone of 600 or 750 inhabitants depending on the history we read, one-sixth to one-third gone whatever your source reports of rape men paraded through Jerusalem to the cheers of other men and then shot others dispute all the horror blaming it on Arab soldiers whose single-fire guns sought to stave off automatic weapons and mortars

Still

Deir Yassin,where are you?

IV. The exodus of villagers not just Deir Yassin 250,000 refugees in camps symbol of the new order creating fear among people without an army even a government some said they did not even exist living in a land without a people

Deir Yassin, where are you?

The conquerors terrorized in other lands hated and feared and maligned survivors of the slaughtered came a people without a land to call home filling the homes of those who fled becoming a people and a land as one prosperous and strong proud and feared hated too

Deir Yassin, where are you?

V. Are you under the wound scabbed over now by a place for mental health a place of screams and dreams of loves and lives lost remembered repeating in flashing fits of confession and accusation rambling humbled haunted tales of fear and illusion even bouts of sometimes reality? Yad Vashem. Kfar Shaul.

Deir Yassin, where are you?

No word about what lies buried under

Deir Yassin, where are you?

No names on homes still standing as offices and cottages for the new village inmates even as their walls and doors and windows and roofs hold the secrets of yesterday’s disappeared

VI. A visitor stands on the sidewalk tearfully remembering the histories he has read and Holocaust stories he can almost recite word for word from memory and the endless arguments about who killed how many in ‘48 and ‘67 and ‘73 and ‘14 and all the other years too and why it had to be so persist like a bad dream growing more weird frightening ugly

Yad Vashem. Kfar Shaul.

Deir Yassin, where are you?

His mind reciting repeating mumbling stumbling Never Again Never. Again. Knowing knowing knowing it is a promise we have yet to keep